10 ms·

"Cryptocurrencies are trustless, distributed, and uncensorable." "The team behind cryptocurrency X has halted a primary use of the tokens." Hmm...

EdwardDiego 5y ago
Has Binance "gone down for maintenance" yet? Typically happens when the market's scary.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  The market isn't 'scary', this is a small stablecoin, and overall the crypto market is up today[0]. Also exchanges do have issues when the volume is much above the norm but this if anything happens as or more often when there's a lot of buying pressure. It's also much more of an issue with e.g. Coinbase than Binance. Binance are more likely to let you trade as you wish but temporarily disable withdraws while they move funds around. 0. https://www.coingecko.com/ https://www.coingecko.com/
  - logifail 5y ago
    > Binance are more likely to let you trade as you wish but temporarily disable withdraws while they move funds around I was under the impression that providers being able to "temporarily disable withdrawals" [due to lack of liquidity, political pressure, or indeed any other reason] is one of the key things that crypto didn't suffer from?
    - Tenoke 5y ago
      On-chain sure. I am not sure why you'd expect guarantees off-chain. If you let me handle an asset for you instead of handling it yourself you are bound by how I operate, not just how the asset itself operates. Though I am also not sure why you'd think liquidity doesn't matter, that's neither here nor there.
      - logifail 5y ago
        > If you let me handle an asset for you instead of handling it yourself you are bound by how I operate, not just how the asset itself operates Is it possible (just for example) to exchange fiat for crypto, or crypto for fiat, or indeed one crypto for another, without having to involve an "off-chain"* counterparty which comes with no guarantees? In the fiat world it would appear one can do an exchange "old school" by going to a physical bank branch and exchanging [physical] fiat for fiat (USD to EUR or whatever) and not have to worry that the transaction is going to be halted half way through due to "temporary restrictions" leaving you unable to access your capital. * I'm not sure I properly understand this phrase as you've used it
        Tenoke 5y ago
        >Is it possible (just for example) to exchange fiat for crypto, or crypto for fiat, or indeed one crypto for another, without having to involve an "off-chain"* counterparty which comes with no guarantees? Fiat exists inherently off-chain, so you can't not involve an off-chain as you put it, unless you count stablecoins (government or non-government issued) as fiat. Crypto for crypto or crypto for stablecoins you can exchange purely on-chain via DEXs. >In the fiat world it would appear one can do an exchange "old school" by going to a physical bank branch and exchanging [physical] fiat for fiat (USD to EUR or whatever) and not have to worry that the transaction is going to be halted half way through due to "temporary restrictions" leaving you unable to access your capital. When you involve a bank or brokerage or paypal you do face those same risks (but possibly to a lesser extent) with fiat.
        logifail 4y ago
        > When you involve a bank or brokerage or paypal you do face those same risks (but possibly to a lesser extent) with fiat. Aren't money exchange services fairly heavily regulated, for precisely this reason? I'm asking specifically about unregulated counterparty risk. Which there seems to be quite a lot of in the grey area between crypto and, well, everything else that isn't pure crypto.
        cassepipe 4y ago
  - emptysongglass 5y ago
    Folks, nothing has been said by the commenter that is non-factual. Please contribute to making HN a space of curiosity. The commenter didn't even take a stand on crypto vs fiat. The market isn't scary. The stock market also halts trades when things get rough.
    - cycomanic 5y ago
      I think the point of criticism is (as alluded by the previous poster) that crypto (I can't believe that this term now means cryptocurrency, not cryptography) proponents like to say that they are different from traditional markets which are "corrupted" by those with power. That said, I agree that this should be a point to debate not downvote.
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago
    Sorry, I meant "when the markets for coins Binance is heavily invested in/front running is scary".
- lalaland1125 5y ago
  This one is too small to have a larger effect on the market. Only 2% the size of Terra UST
  - FabHK 4y ago
    Sorry, I saw on Coinmarketcap a market cap of around $4bn for DEI, which is about 25% of UST, or 2.5% of the entire USD stable coin "market" (while UST was about 10%). Is that what you meant? https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dei/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dei/
    - Fargoan 4y ago
      I just checked coingecko and the highest market cap Dei ever had was barely over $100 million
    - lalaland1125 4y ago
      That market cap is inaccurate because it doesn't represent the true supply. Note the red explanation marks that indicate how the data is inaccurate. https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/dei-token https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/dei-token has a better estimate. At peak, DEI was only around $100 million or so. Compared to roughly $20 billion for UST. You could also look at the volume. UST frequently had $500 million of volume each day. DEI only had a couple million at best. (Volume is of course also a flawed metric and can be faked, but the lack of effort in faking volume is a signal in and of itself.)
      - kristjansson 4y ago
        Interesting. Coingecko is basically reporting #(float) * price for a coin, while Coinmarketcap is reporting #(minted) * price. Neither of which feel perfectly accurate for token pricing, but do seem like reasonable high and low endpoints, with the gecko version closer to an estimate of 'other peoples money' involved in the coin.
        lalaland1125 4y ago
ipnon 5y ago
The smart contracts are still ironbound to whatever they end up compiling to. It's the pesky humans who are ruining things. It can be easily argued that any cryptocurrency involving human intervention is vulnerable to ... human intervention.
- mavu 5y ago
  Oh, don't worry about it, with the amount of (increasing) energy demand and the resulting pressure on climate change, Crypto is working hard at removing that bad influence.
  - arunprakash01 4y ago
kybernetikos 5y ago
Yeah, those attributes describe just one point in the design space of tokens running on distributed ledgers. It's perfectly possible to create tokens that require trust, that have centralised elements or that can have their transactions easily censored.
superkuh 5y ago
Yep. Pretty much nothing created after 2015 is an actual cryptocurrency. It's just the normal finance scammers dressing their scams up with cryptocurrency buzzword camo. It hasn't been possible to organically grow a cryptocurrency from the vulnerable starting state to usefulness in nearly a decade.
- driverdan 5y ago
  Nice No True Scotsman fallacy.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spivak 4y ago
    I hate this meme, "No True Scotsman" is not the same thing as language being descriptive and evolving over time. There are two concepts the parent is describing: the set of things described as crypto made before 2015 and the set of things described as crypto made after 2015. The two groups are well defined. The fact that there isn't a formal name for the era of "pre-finance-bro crypto" or "first wave crypto" doesn't mean it's has anything to do with the scotts. The parent's language might be a little ambiguous but that's to be expected when trying to describe yet unnamed things and their meaning is clear enough. Willfully misunderstanding someone's words to create a logical flaw that isn't there should be its own fallacy.
    - master-lincoln 4y ago
      superkuh did not specify what exactly changed. Saying nothing created after 2015 is an "actual cryptocurrency" without justifying that somehow makes me think this might be a "no true Scotsman" argument. What constitutes these eras? And why do you bring that up when it was about a class of products not being "an actual cryptocurrency". I would have thought there are properties to the product that make it belong to the class, not merely when it was created.To me these unnamed things and their meaning you talk about are absolutely not clear enough. I believe you two have a point. But it doesn't come across... PS: I would argue in 2015 "crypto" was mostly known as abbreviation for cryptography and had nothing to do with decentralized public ledgers.
gonzo41 4y ago
I heard on the radio a financial planner talking about the desperate need for regulation in the crypto space because of the terra/luna crash. I laughed, I mean I really laughed. I'm a happy no coiner, and I don't know why people are so excited to experience banking in the 1820's. "What do you mean the bank is out of money?"
- gitfan86 4y ago
  Same thing with DAOs democratizing governance. Have you been to a city council meeting? You want ANYONE to be able to create a proposal that everyone else has to vote on?
  - alasdair_ 4y ago
    Yes. With some kind of minimum number of initial votes pledged towards it and some other anti-spam measures.
  - pphysch 4y ago
    Too many people are married to the idea of how "democracy" and "decentralization" works in ideal conditions and turn a blind eye to their practical faults. Makes em easy to dupe...
  - wing-_-nuts 4y ago
    Yes I do. We could accomplish so much more with a direct democracy. This Roe v Wade thing? We could have a referendum and be done with it. Instead it will be fought over by ineffectual politicians for the next decade and accomplish little. Yes I realize that sometimes referendums give sub-optimal results (i.e. brexit), but I'd much rather live in a truly representative democracy that occasionally gets it wrong than a republic that doesn't represent the people's wishes at all.
    - gitfan86 4y ago
      I would like to hold a referendum to decide the organization's official stance on what is more attractive on a man between these two options: A. Hitler Mustache B. KKK Hood Do you think everyone should have to vote on that?
idiotsecant 4y ago
Yes, many crypto projects are permissioned scams. The few that aren't just may change the world yet. There are plenty of people who continue to work on these projects as markets fluctuate and crypto trends come and go.
Animats 4y ago
This is when which blockchain it's on really matters. DEI is on Fantom. Unclear who controls that. It's a "consensus blockchain", which means some group of operators has control. With UST, the issuer controlled the blockchain and shut it down completely.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >With UST, the issuer controlled the blockchain and shut it down completely. The issuer didn't control Terra. The Terra blockchain is unable to come to connesus about creating a new block if 33% of the staked Luna goes offline. You just have to get the largest validators to agree to go offline and it will stop.
  - Animats 4y ago
    Hm. Is that a potential failure mode for other proof of stake blockchains?
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      This is speciﬁc to tendermint consensus. Casper consensus doesn't seem to do it.

EdwardDiego 5y ago

Has Binance "gone down for maintenance" yet? Typically happens when the market's scary.

Tenoke 5y ago
The market isn't 'scary', this is a small stablecoin, and overall the crypto market is up today[0]. Also exchanges do have issues when the volume is much above the norm but this if anything happens as or more often when there's a lot of buying pressure. It's also much more of an issue with e.g. Coinbase than Binance. Binance are more likely to let you trade as you wish but temporarily disable withdraws while they move funds around. 0. https://www.coingecko.com/ https://www.coingecko.com/
- logifail 5y ago
  > Binance are more likely to let you trade as you wish but temporarily disable withdraws while they move funds around I was under the impression that providers being able to "temporarily disable withdrawals" [due to lack of liquidity, political pressure, or indeed any other reason] is one of the key things that crypto didn't suffer from?
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    On-chain sure. I am not sure why you'd expect guarantees off-chain. If you let me handle an asset for you instead of handling it yourself you are bound by how I operate, not just how the asset itself operates. Though I am also not sure why you'd think liquidity doesn't matter, that's neither here nor there.
    - logifail 5y ago
      > If you let me handle an asset for you instead of handling it yourself you are bound by how I operate, not just how the asset itself operates Is it possible (just for example) to exchange fiat for crypto, or crypto for fiat, or indeed one crypto for another, without having to involve an "off-chain"* counterparty which comes with no guarantees? In the fiat world it would appear one can do an exchange "old school" by going to a physical bank branch and exchanging [physical] fiat for fiat (USD to EUR or whatever) and not have to worry that the transaction is going to be halted half way through due to "temporary restrictions" leaving you unable to access your capital. * I'm not sure I properly understand this phrase as you've used it
      - Tenoke 5y ago
        >Is it possible (just for example) to exchange fiat for crypto, or crypto for fiat, or indeed one crypto for another, without having to involve an "off-chain"* counterparty which comes with no guarantees? Fiat exists inherently off-chain, so you can't not involve an off-chain as you put it, unless you count stablecoins (government or non-government issued) as fiat. Crypto for crypto or crypto for stablecoins you can exchange purely on-chain via DEXs. >In the fiat world it would appear one can do an exchange "old school" by going to a physical bank branch and exchanging [physical] fiat for fiat (USD to EUR or whatever) and not have to worry that the transaction is going to be halted half way through due to "temporary restrictions" leaving you unable to access your capital. When you involve a bank or brokerage or paypal you do face those same risks (but possibly to a lesser extent) with fiat.
        logifail 4y ago
        > When you involve a bank or brokerage or paypal you do face those same risks (but possibly to a lesser extent) with fiat. Aren't money exchange services fairly heavily regulated, for precisely this reason? I'm asking specifically about unregulated counterparty risk. Which there seems to be quite a lot of in the grey area between crypto and, well, everything else that isn't pure crypto.
      - cassepipe 4y ago
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  Folks, nothing has been said by the commenter that is non-factual. Please contribute to making HN a space of curiosity. The commenter didn't even take a stand on crypto vs fiat. The market isn't scary. The stock market also halts trades when things get rough.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    I think the point of criticism is (as alluded by the previous poster) that crypto (I can't believe that this term now means cryptocurrency, not cryptography) proponents like to say that they are different from traditional markets which are "corrupted" by those with power. That said, I agree that this should be a point to debate not downvote.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Sorry, I meant "when the markets for coins Binance is heavily invested in/front running is scary".
lalaland1125 5y ago
This one is too small to have a larger effect on the market. Only 2% the size of Terra UST
- FabHK 4y ago
  Sorry, I saw on Coinmarketcap a market cap of around $4bn for DEI, which is about 25% of UST, or 2.5% of the entire USD stable coin "market" (while UST was about 10%). Is that what you meant? https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dei/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dei/
  - Fargoan 4y ago
    I just checked coingecko and the highest market cap Dei ever had was barely over $100 million
  - lalaland1125 4y ago
    That market cap is inaccurate because it doesn't represent the true supply. Note the red explanation marks that indicate how the data is inaccurate. https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/dei-token https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/dei-token has a better estimate. At peak, DEI was only around $100 million or so. Compared to roughly $20 billion for UST. You could also look at the volume. UST frequently had $500 million of volume each day. DEI only had a couple million at best. (Volume is of course also a flawed metric and can be faked, but the lack of effort in faking volume is a signal in and of itself.)
    - kristjansson 4y ago
      Interesting. Coingecko is basically reporting #(float) * price for a coin, while Coinmarketcap is reporting #(minted) * price. Neither of which feel perfectly accurate for token pricing, but do seem like reasonable high and low endpoints, with the gecko version closer to an estimate of 'other peoples money' involved in the coin.
      - lalaland1125 4y ago

ipnon 5y ago

The smart contracts are still ironbound to whatever they end up compiling to. It's the pesky humans who are ruining things. It can be easily argued that any cryptocurrency involving human intervention is vulnerable to ... human intervention.

mavu 5y ago
Oh, don't worry about it, with the amount of (increasing) energy demand and the resulting pressure on climate change, Crypto is working hard at removing that bad influence.
- arunprakash01 4y ago

kybernetikos 5y ago

Yeah, those attributes describe just one point in the design space of tokens running on distributed ledgers. It's perfectly possible to create tokens that require trust, that have centralised elements or that can have their transactions easily censored.

superkuh 5y ago

Yep. Pretty much nothing created after 2015 is an actual cryptocurrency. It's just the normal finance scammers dressing their scams up with cryptocurrency buzzword camo. It hasn't been possible to organically grow a cryptocurrency from the vulnerable starting state to usefulness in nearly a decade.

driverdan 5y ago
Nice No True Scotsman fallacy.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Spivak 4y ago
  I hate this meme, "No True Scotsman" is not the same thing as language being descriptive and evolving over time. There are two concepts the parent is describing: the set of things described as crypto made before 2015 and the set of things described as crypto made after 2015. The two groups are well defined. The fact that there isn't a formal name for the era of "pre-finance-bro crypto" or "first wave crypto" doesn't mean it's has anything to do with the scotts. The parent's language might be a little ambiguous but that's to be expected when trying to describe yet unnamed things and their meaning is clear enough. Willfully misunderstanding someone's words to create a logical flaw that isn't there should be its own fallacy.
  - master-lincoln 4y ago
    superkuh did not specify what exactly changed. Saying nothing created after 2015 is an "actual cryptocurrency" without justifying that somehow makes me think this might be a "no true Scotsman" argument. What constitutes these eras? And why do you bring that up when it was about a class of products not being "an actual cryptocurrency". I would have thought there are properties to the product that make it belong to the class, not merely when it was created.To me these unnamed things and their meaning you talk about are absolutely not clear enough. I believe you two have a point. But it doesn't come across... PS: I would argue in 2015 "crypto" was mostly known as abbreviation for cryptography and had nothing to do with decentralized public ledgers.

gonzo41 4y ago

I heard on the radio a financial planner talking about the desperate need for regulation in the crypto space because of the terra/luna crash. I laughed, I mean I really laughed. I'm a happy no coiner, and I don't know why people are so excited to experience banking in the 1820's. "What do you mean the bank is out of money?"

gitfan86 4y ago
Same thing with DAOs democratizing governance. Have you been to a city council meeting? You want ANYONE to be able to create a proposal that everyone else has to vote on?
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  Yes. With some kind of minimum number of initial votes pledged towards it and some other anti-spam measures.
- pphysch 4y ago
  Too many people are married to the idea of how "democracy" and "decentralization" works in ideal conditions and turn a blind eye to their practical faults. Makes em easy to dupe...
- wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  Yes I do. We could accomplish so much more with a direct democracy. This Roe v Wade thing? We could have a referendum and be done with it. Instead it will be fought over by ineffectual politicians for the next decade and accomplish little. Yes I realize that sometimes referendums give sub-optimal results (i.e. brexit), but I'd much rather live in a truly representative democracy that occasionally gets it wrong than a republic that doesn't represent the people's wishes at all.
  - gitfan86 4y ago
    I would like to hold a referendum to decide the organization's official stance on what is more attractive on a man between these two options: A. Hitler Mustache B. KKK Hood Do you think everyone should have to vote on that?

idiotsecant 4y ago

Yes, many crypto projects are permissioned scams. The few that aren't just may change the world yet. There are plenty of people who continue to work on these projects as markets fluctuate and crypto trends come and go.

Animats 4y ago

This is when which blockchain it's on really matters. DEI is on Fantom. Unclear who controls that. It's a "consensus blockchain", which means some group of operators has control. With UST, the issuer controlled the blockchain and shut it down completely.

charcircuit 4y ago
>With UST, the issuer controlled the blockchain and shut it down completely. The issuer didn't control Terra. The Terra blockchain is unable to come to connesus about creating a new block if 33% of the staked Luna goes offline. You just have to get the largest validators to agree to go offline and it will stop.
- Animats 4y ago
  Hm. Is that a potential failure mode for other proof of stake blockchains?
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    This is speciﬁc to tendermint consensus. Casper consensus doesn't seem to do it.